The Believers by Zoe Heller

At a party in London in 1962, Audrey, a young typist, spots Joel, an older man, and thinks him "either very charming or very irritating". He turns out to be charming, and also American. He asks her to move to New York. She agrees.

Zoë Heller, an expert storyteller, then whizzes forward 40 years. Joel is now a 72-year-old radical lawyer. Audrey, now 58, is rather brash and rude. The next thing you know, Joel keels over in court. As he lies in hospital we find out what really happened over the last four decades, through the lives of Joel and Audrey's two daughters — one a princess, one an over-eater — and their adopted dropout brother. Neatly written, very engrossing, very good.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

This is a comic, tragic, supremely entertaining novel about one family's struggles with the consolations of faith and the trials of doubt. When Audrey makes a devastating discovery about her husband, New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff, she is forced to re-examine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joel's children will soon have to come to terms with this unsettling secret themselves, but for the meantime, they are trying to cope with their own dilemmas. Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, is grappling with a new-found attachment to Orthodox Judaism. Karla, an unhappily married social worker, is falling in love with an unlikely suitor at the hospital where she works. Adopted brother Lenny is back on drugs again. In the course of battling their own demons and each other, every member of the family is called upon to decide what - if anything - they still believe in.